


I've turned to water (like a teardrop in your palm)

by loudamy



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Early Relationship, Established Relationship, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, but also fluff!! because I am no masochist, definitely a smidge of angst, dont mind me just filling in the gaps
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2020-10-13 13:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20583338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loudamy/pseuds/loudamy
Summary: (And suddenly, Jake doesn’t care about The Vulture, or his decomposition of everything he’s worked for. He forgets about Holt’s absence, and the way it presses, unrelenting, on his chest. Because here is Amy, right there in front of him, and God, she still tastes like everything he’s ever wanted, and all he knows is the lull of her voice as she whispers his name.)A canon compliant series of oneshots, spanning the show from s 1 onwards.





	1. I got one foot in the golden life (one foot in the gutter)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake & Amy prepare for his imminent departure for WITSEC. set pre-florida, 3x23.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi I'm starting a multi-chap of random one-shots/prompts and yes I am very late to the game but sshhh I needed to write about these two
> 
> fic title from 'it must have been love'  
chapter title from 'outer space/carry on'

**I got one foot in the golden life (one foot in the gutter)**

x

‘It’s not fair,’ Amy keeps saying, whining, really, but he doesn’t care, doesn’t want to imagine some distorted reality in which he doesn’t wake up to that voice, soft and scratchy with the last dregs of sleep, a reality which may very well become his in a matter of days.

He doesn’t want to think about it, but Amy wants to talk about it. Won’t stop talking about it, actually, and he’s pretty sure it’s because she can’t bear the silence, brittle and unyielding and heavy with words that hover, unspoken, between them.

‘I’ll be back before you’ve even had time to miss me.’ says Jake, and if his voice trembles a little at the end it’s only because he’s still stupidly tipsy on dismantling Figgis’s operation and Amy finally returning from that wretched Texas prison shiv-free and floating on air after successfully squeezing Maura for all the information she’s worth.

His eyes light up. ‘Hey, maybe Criss Angel will be doing shows in New York again by the time I get back!’

But Amy doesn’t laugh, and Jake’s heart splinters and the shards gather thick at the back of his throat, because her eyes are glazed with tears and she’s sniffling and reaching for him and he doesn’t know what to do – 

‘You’re such an idiot,’ she says, rasping through her tears, ‘but I don’t want to spend another six months without you-’

‘Amy-’

‘-without your terrible shower singing-’

‘Hey, I thought I was okay! You said it made my bagpipes playing sound good!’

‘-and your debilitating spending problem-’

‘I’ve started saving a hundred dollars a month now I’ve bought “The Hurt Locker” and I can watch the first fifteen minutes without renting it.’

‘-and you stealing all the duvet every night so you can wrap yourself in a blanket burrito even though you know I’m always cold-’

‘We wouldn’t have that problem if you offered to be big spoon more often.’

‘-a-and without the dumb notes you write in the mirror when it’s all steamed up and watching documentaries with me even though you don’t care whether or not penguins have knees and the mattress you bought because-’

‘You’re orangina,’ Jake says, trying to smile but his voice cracks, and this time when she reaches for him with flailing hands and tears tracked down her lovely, ashen face, he gathers her up and brings her tight to his chest, so her forehead is pressed against the spot where his heart beats a restless tattoo.

He thinks about a dozen things and nothing, all at once.

He thinks about morbid piles of grey paperwork on which he’ll sign his name for the last time in God knows how long, and the sad twitch of Holt’s upper lip and the glint of the thick gold band on his finger as it shook against his glass.

He thinks about the grape juice stain on the ceiling above his desk that looks like an octopus eating a hotdog and the way that Amy’s upper lip delicately curled when she came back from an interrogation on her very first day at the nine-nine and saw Jake standing on a chair, with a purple grin and clutched handfuls of sticky hair.

He thinks about the way Terry sucked in his breath and fingered his suspenders and knocked back his brandy in one fell swoop the moment Jake managed to choke out the words ‘Figgis’ and ‘death threat’.

He thinks about Rosa crisply snapping a pool cue, showering the floor in dead wood, her stormy silence, the way she tore at her curls when Pimento took her aside, spewing half-broken promises and half-baked plans.

He thinks about Charles alternating between crying into his beer and erratic babbling about all the things he’ll do if he ever gets his stubby little fingers on Figgis, and with that all the spontaneous high-fives he’ll miss and disgusting erotic food recipes he won’t find lying on his desk in the morning ‘for when Amy’s ovulating’ even though _no, _he isn’t ever going to attempt to make a goat’s cheese and boar’s testicle soufflé, whether or not it is a famed aphrodisiac.

But mostly, he’s thinking about the girl coiled in his arms; you know, the one who’s curled her hands around his heart for the past few years, who makes him feel like it doesn’t matter that his dad left him and he practically raised himself on cartoons and pop-tarts, because when he’s with her he feels as though he’s bleeding sunlight and Amy’s basking in his glow.

He’s thinking about _I love you so much _and the way those words had been stoppered at his lips for the past month or so, Jake too fraught with old insecurities to let them show until Amy took the plunge (she always knows where they are) and _we should move in together _and how that’s all been cruelly picked apart in a matter of moments.

He thinks about the past three weeks apart and stiffly wandering around her empty apartment even after he’d disposed of her very dead tropical fish (and attempted to replace them, but _damn _they were expensive and it doesn’t seem like Amy even cares about that right now) with his nose pressed to the raggedy old hoodie she keeps stealing from him under the pretence of throwing it away but he knows she sleeps in it on the increasingly rare night they spend apart. (It smells like her).

He thinks about spending another three weeks – or even longer than that – away from her, and his entire chest seizes up.

‘Hey, babe, I don’t know how long we have.’ Jake says, voice muffled by her hair, which he’s currently inhaling with greedy breaths, because who knows when he’ll next get to do this? What if he forgets the way she smells and the way it completely overwhelms him, soothes his inflamed nerves? ‘I’m expecting Holt to call soon and then I’ll have to go back to the precinct.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Amy mumbles, as he knew she would. She’s not crying any more, he notes with some relief as she pulls away, fiddling with his heartstrings as she does so.

‘Okay.’

‘What do you want to do? Watch Die Hard? Go see if that dog with the bark that sounds like a Pokémon is at the park?’

‘None of that.’ Jake says, surprising himself, and Amy waits with pinched white fingers and shadows that look like bruises under her eyes. ‘I just want to – I just want you –’

He’s not particularly verbose, doesn’t feel like speaking any more, but Amy nods in that way she’s always been able to do; he doesn’t need to cut open his soul and bear it any more, because when she’s standing before him and nodding like that he knows that she understands.

She moves back towards him jerkily, and he cups her face in his hands and brings it flush against him with hard fingers, takes her mouth hot and hungry and not remotely sweet. She lets out a low whine against him, entwining her arms around his back, nails scrabbling against the soft plaid.

So maybe she’s done talking, too.

He walks them gracelessly into her bedroom, thumping his hip against the doorframe, almost embracing the dull pain. They’ve done this dance too many times to count now, and he doesn’t just mean the sex. He’s so sick of being ripped away from her, each absence tempered with something bittersweet and faintly unresolved.

‘Jake-’ she tugs, hard, at his shock of curls and he lifts his mouth, swollen with the mere taste of her, from her collarbone to kiss her cheek.

It’s a tender move. It speaks of the volume with which he loves her.

Because, God, he loves her so much it heaves an earthquake in his chest, it bites like thunder through his veins. The sun would blister down to a runny eye against the burn of how much Jake Peralta loves Amy Santiago, the moon would weep and crumble to silver dust in his trembling fingertips, crushed by the gravity of how much he loves her. It’s always been there, he thinks, a lonely seed, and now the roots are tangled around his heart.

Her eyes prick again and he can’t bear it, so moves to swallow the resounding hollowness in his throat by kissing her again, but then those dark eyes spark, a match that lights his heart on fire, and she suddenly surges forward to nip at his jaw, his neck, his bottom lip. She presses wet, open-mouthed kisses to every sensitive spot she can find, before grazing her teeth against him, making him moan and shake against her.

With every well-placed kiss, Jake thinks _I love you_. When he pulls off her blouse, upsetting as many buttons as he can – they’re both too frantic to care – he ghosts his fingers over the constellation of freckles he knows pepper her lower back.

Yesterday, too many to count.

Now, not enough.

‘I love you,’ he says, through haggard breaths and the distracting sensation of Amy’s nimble fingers busy at his belt. He doesn’t want to ever forget the way she lights up, radiant, when he says it, and in response, her nails scratch tiny hearts into his hipbones.

He wants to say something else, something worthy of everything she means to him, something along the lines of ‘I don’t ever want to wake up without you again, I’m tired of us being apart and I really don’t want to go into WITSEC because what if they send me somewhere where you can’t get all-you-can-eat pizza for a dollar ninety-nine on every corner?’

But then she’s yanking down his jeans and wrapping her fingers around him while she sucks at the pulse point at his neck which positively _jumps_ and his mind is going blissfully blank and Jake decides for now, he’s okay to just feel.

x

‘I’ll give you some time. Detective Santiago is practically chomping at the bit outside the door.’ Marshal Haas says, in a quiet voice that tells Jake she’s watched this happen thousand times before. ‘But not too long. Sign the paper.’

She swings out of the room, and instantaneously, Amy swings in, looking flustered and harried and searching his face for answers he doesn’t have.

‘She thinks it’ll maybe be around six months,’ says Jake, gaze fixated on the tabletop, ‘could be longer, give or take. Maybe – uh – maybe a year.’

He’s said his goodbyes to the rest of the squad. Let Charles hug him for an allocated ten minutes because trying to struggle out of that vice-like grip was fruitless, and anyway, for once he’s found he doesn’t actually hate it so much.

Rosa gave him a nod and slapped his arm and told him not to do anything more stupid than usual and he thought back to their first day at the Academy when she displayed a profound apathy toward him and then she was glancing pointedly at Amy and silently promising to look after her, and wow, they’ve come pretty far.

Terry crushed him in a hug that probably strained five of Jake’s muscles and Hitchcock and Scully, despite having no idea what was going on, offered him a slice of their pizza, which he felt disgusted and touched by in equal measures.

‘It won’t be a year.’ Amy says, and he meets her eyes to see them steely and determined, if a little glassy. ‘I’ll get you home before then, Jake. We all will. Rosa and Charles and Terry and I – I’m sure even Hitchcock and Scully if we bribe them with that cheesecake from Martha’s. Although they might be less of a help than a hindrance.’

He knows Amy will do everything she can to track down Figgis and have him incarcerated. She doesn’t do things by halves, Amy, even if it nearly kills her, and that’s what’s plaguing him. If he’s going to spend countless days sweltering under the unforgiving Florida sun – he still can’t believe it – it’s not to lie awake worrying that Amy’s still at the precinct at 3 a.m., that all she’s eaten for the past four days is half a granola bar and some limp carrot sticks, that she’s poring over witness statements and grainy crime scene photos instead of new binder tabs.

‘Where’s Holt?’ he says instead. Amy looks at him for a long minute before replying.

‘I think the marshal is in with him now. He hasn’t even had a chance to ring Kevin yet.’

Kevin in Paris. Amy in Brooklyn. Holt and Jake in Florida. A wave of nausea tides in his throat and it’s only the cold throb of the metal tabletop against his hands keeping it down. ‘Larry Sherbet’ isn’t even a cool WITSEC name; it doesn’t inspire any tragic or incredibly elaborate backstory. It’s lame and he hates it and he can’t even complain about it to Amy because she’s not allowed to know anything about his new identity.

Jake might not care about breaking rules, but she does, especially rules put in place to preserve his life.

‘We should probably talk about what happens while you’re gone.’ says Amy, and there’s a sickening pulse in his stomach because if this is them breaking up he’s definitely not going to make it through six months anywhere and if she didn’t already have his heart clenched between her fingers it’d be in his stomach by now.

‘Right, yeah, cool cool cool.’ he says, despite knowing his poor attempt at nonchalance won’t fool her.

‘I’ll look after your apartment.’ says Amy. ‘I’m sure Charles will help me. And…I’ll get through as many of your open cases as I can while I’m working on the Figgis case.’

Instantly, he feels so foolish even for a minute for imagining the worst. Here’s this girl, and she _loves _him, and if there’s anything that will carry him through this next awful, lonely period it’s believing that he’ll be coming back to her.

‘Jake,’ she says softly, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

He’s sliding out of his seat and she’s wound around him easily before either of them can say anything else; when his first tear dampens her cheek he knows that she feels it but she just clutches him tighter, as though daring any singular force to tear them apart in this one inscrutable moment.

‘Don’t delete my DVR recordings because I’ve got the second Die Hard queued up,’ he whispers in her ear and she snorts despite everything.

‘Jake, you’ve got them all on DVD, why do you need them recorded?’

‘Watching it on DVD isn’t the same as watching it on TV, Amy!’ he exclaims, and as an afterthought, ‘don’t watch it without me.’

‘Don’t worry about that happening.’ she says, pressing a thumb to the trail of silver tear-tracks down his cheek.

He kisses her then, gingerly at first because they’re alone in the room but they’re still in a precinct full of cops and Amy’s been pretty stringent about not breaking her rules against PDA in the workplace since the Dozerman incident (although there was that one time in the copy-room, which Jake still remembers fondly and which caused Amy to throw an egg roll at him the last time he brought it up, which she promptly told him to throw in the trash).

But apparently your boyfriend being sent off God knows where for God knows how long is a pretty solid exception in Amy Santiago’s book, because she teases the edge of his lip with her tongue and lets his hands drift and gently cup her ass as he brings her closer to him.

There’s a knock on the door and they startle apart; Amy’s hair is poking out of her ponytail in languid tendrils and Jake’s mouth is deliciously pink and he’s still dazed and his blood is stinging at every pressure point from her touch.

‘Jake. Have you signed the papers?’ Marshal Haas demands through the door.

Amy shakes her head at him exasperatedly when he makes a horrified, guilty face and as he stumbles back over to the table lie Amy asks the marshal for another few minutes while Jake signs away his name, his life, everything he knows.

She’s silent while his pen scratches over the paper; he wonders if she can tell his hand is quivering. His handwriting’s appalling but he tries hard to make his signature legible, knowing this may well be the last time he writes it for a while.

‘I’m so proud of you.’

Her eyes are sparkling with tears again and it’s then that he knows with startling clarity that it’s her he’s doing this all for, so when takes her hand and opens the door to a distinctly unimpressed Marshal Haas, Holt waiting sombrely behind her, he tries to convey that by squeezing her fingers between his own as tightly as he can.

‘I love you,’ she says quickly, frantic with the realisation that this is her last chance to say it for an unfairly long time.

‘I love you too, Santiago.’ his smile is wry and his kiss is fleeting and he can’t possibly impart in so few words exactly how much he loves her (like, so much. He’d bring her the world if he could figure out a way to do that. Scratch that. The galaxy. The universe. You get the idea).

Abruptly, unforgivably, their time is up; the marshal’s hand is on his shoulder and he’s being frogmarched away and he’s inexplicably reminded of that case they cracked the day Holt took over command of the nine-nine, and _Detective Santiago, don’t walk away from me_ except it’s _him _leaving her and he doesn’t want to he doesn’t want to he doesn’t want to –

‘Peralta,’ Holt says, cutting cleanly through Jake’s downward spiral as he’s so accustomed to doing by now. At least that won’t change. At least they’ll broach this horrifying new chapter together.

‘She’ll be okay, Jake.’ he says, and Jake nods because if he speaks he might cry and Amy’s still only a few feet away and if she starts crying again he _definitely _won’t be able to leave.

He leaves Brooklyn with this one image of Amy ingrained in his wearied mind; perched precariously on the edge of his desk, head thrown back in laughter, pantsuit slightly wrinkled by the long day behind her, lively and beautiful and full of promise.

(He doesn't know it, but he'll be back in time to watch the leaves scattered on Amy's stoop burn to a mirage of reds and oranges. She'll help him hobble up her front steps and his crutch will crunch against the golden foliage and she'll smile and kiss him and the pain of the last six months will ebb away in slow, sure waves).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm writing as much as I can before I go back to uni and my diss/my degree in general swallows me whole :) this will be multi-chap and I've got like 3 things half-written but idk how often I'll be posting because I'm graduating next year woo adulthood
> 
> kudos&comments are so so lovely and always appreciated.
> 
> come say hi on tumblr @vic-kovac


	2. so with toothpaste kisses (I'll be yours and you'll be mine)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New captains, PR, and misdemeanours unsettle Jake, but Amy handles his heart like it’s some precious, hallowed thing. Glimpses into their early relationship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello this has been a wonderful week, hasn't it just!!!!! I think we all know what I'm talking about :))
> 
> chapter title from 'toothpaste kisses' by the maccabees

**i. first date**

‘late night kisses, divine’

Jake has a smudge on the bridge of his nose.

It could be from his pen; he was gnawing on the nib all morning, but the trim of his lips are blue from the ink and the smudge is definitely more of a red.

(Yes, she’s been looking at his lips. Only a little. Definitely within the limits of the workplace code of conduct.)

He’s been surreptitiously snacking from his stash of red vines all morning – he only goes for those when he’s a bit antsy, she thinks the chewing relaxes him a bit – but the smudge didn’t appear until after lunch, when he came back all flustered, with rosy hues in his cheeks and yes, she’s been distracted by him all day since they kissed in the evidence lockup and she felt his heart’s manic tattoo against her palm and tasted him, warm and sweet and pliant against her, since his hands slid against her spine before gently roving back to her waist, and God, she is completely wrecked from that one kiss.

A sudden, loud crash of files onto her desk brings her careening back to reality; the motion upsets her jar of paperclips and Amy lifts her head, ready to bite the perpetrator’s head off, but Rosa just stares blankly back at her.

‘I called your name three times, Santiago, what’s wrong with you today?’

Amy opens and closes her mouth a few times and tries to ignore the fact that Jake is absolutely peering over his monitor at her in what she’s sure he thinks is a discreet way.

‘Uh – Captain Holt. Captain Holt leaving. And Gina! Gina, who is dear to everyone in the precinct.’ she says, keenly aware of how hot her face is getting.

‘Right.’ says Rosa, in a tone alternating between vague disinterest and careful scepticism. ‘Well, I need your nerd brain to organise these files. Hitchcock and Scully were playing hangman over them earlier and now some of the threes look like eights-’

Amy hums to placate her, but her gaze flickers over to meet Jake’s across their desk. ‘Smooth,’ he mouths, with his eyebrows raised, and she’s smiling despite herself when she finally looks back at Rosa.

‘You all over that?’ Rosa says, and there’s a glint in her eye that doesn’t bode well for Jake’s subtlety – or Amy’s, for that fact – but Amy nods and Rosa sidles away without another word (or double entendre).

The smudge is still on Jake’s nose when they lock eyes again, but it doesn’t stop Amy from nursing that idle, secret smile for the rest of the day.

She manages to suppress the urge to thoroughly vet Bouche Manger until _after _work (she trusts Jake, but it’s reasonable to say his eating habits are questionable – there was that one time he brought in homemade chicken fingers after a particularly long shift together and they both spent four hours in the staff toilets.

‘You broke our record! Bathroom hogs!’ Hitchock had said indignantly, as Scully cleaned in-between his toes with police tape in the background).

x

Amy clears out of the precinct at a respectable six p.m., probably the earliest she’s left work in a while – and falters when she turns the corner and sees Jake leaning up against his car, shifting weight from foot to foot sheepishly.

‘Hi,’ she says abruptly, and he grins, probably at her predictable awkwardness. ‘What are you-?’

He springs forward and grabs her hand, which was hanging stiffly at her side; she feels herself relax into his touch – should it be this easy so early? – and the way the dappled evening light passes over his eyes makes them seem almost translucent, and she’s falling, falling.

‘Uh – just wanted to check we’re still on for tonight.’ says Jake, searching her face. She knows how long he’s wanted this for; truthfully, so has she for nearly the same, but the realisation that he’s actually nervous she might say no, that she’s changed her mind, is suddenly, strikingly evident.

‘Definitely.’ she says, and for once she doesn’t care that the slight tremor in her voice betrays her nerves, because he’s nervous and she’s nervous and it only makes sense for them to take this leap together.

‘Okay then, so…Amy Santiago, will you go on the probably-not worst date ever with me tonight? You don’t have to say yes.’

(But I really hope you do.)

It’s not often that Amy feels emboldened like this, but she’s very quickly learning that Jake has this inexplicable way of bringing it out in her; maybe it’s the way his hair rests against his forehead, like a curl of smoke, or maybe it’s just the fact that she likes him so much, but she leans in and kisses him, softly, just at the edge of his lip. His mouth is cold when as he responds, and there’s this hesitance simmering between them to go much farther.

Amy pulls away and admires the slope of his eyelashes, delicate against the bone, before he blinks at her, happy with her answer.

‘See you at eight then?’

‘Eight.’ he nods, still a little dazed.

She walks away with the tang of him on her lips.

x

When she finally gets home and frantically does a web search on the restaurant whilst in her towel (after the first few dates with Teddy, Amy made it a priority to vet wherever he was taking her beforehand to ensure it served something other than pilsners, aka the worst drink invented…ever), she can’t help but sigh a little.

It’s classy but not intimidatingly upmarket, intimate without being claustrophobic…in short, it seems like the ideal place for a first date, and this is coming from a man who offered a woman vending machine snacks as dinner.

He’s trying to impress her, but it’s not like she’s any better, slinging that red dress off its hook because she knows he has a thing for red, and she tells herself the matching lingerie is only to give herself an internal confidence boost, because she intends on keeping to that third rule (it pays off in dividends when later, Jake tugs the dress over her head and she sees the look on his face).

Stepping precariously onto her front stoop, for a moment, there he is; perching on the hood of his car, bare legged but for those shorts, obnoxious smile, crooked bow-tie.

She blinks, and he’s gone, but the nostalgia entwines her like a vine; two years ago he had a crush and she lost a bet and they stupidly tossed peanuts at each other on a lonely rooftop and _this_ is most definitely the date they had from the beginning.

Even, she muses an hour later, if they need kamikaze shots to dilute the awkwardness. Going from this ‘colleagues slash friends to lovers’ thing isn’t easy, you know. That’s one thing she doesn’t have a binder for.

Jake is talking animatedly, hands gesturing wildly, about some case he and Rosa worked before Amy joined the nine-nine, and how much she’s laughing has very little to do with the alcohol.

But he _still _has that smudge on his nose.

‘And it wasn’t until we got him in holding and the paperwork was all done that Rosa turns to me and goes, “did you tell him he had the right to remain silent?”. Probably the only time I’ll arrest a mime and I blew it.’

He huffs a little, as though this three year old blip is still paining him, but even grumpy he’s adorable, perhaps more so…and yet Amy’s stopped fully listening.

‘You – uh – you have a smudge on your nose.’ she says, and Jake raises an eyebrow but before he can lift a hand, she leans over and gently rubs at it.

His skin is warm to the touch, tinted a gentle pink where fingers make contact with it.

‘That’s been bothering me all day,’ she says, but as she trails her thumb shakily down his jaw he suddenly grabs it and holds it in place, and the drunken veil lifts a little because his eyes are soft and intense at once, a dozen shades of chocolate and she wants nothing more than to taste him again but she’s only on her second shot, so she silences the voice suspiciously like Gina’s that’s screaming ‘prude’ in the back of her mind and instead asks, ‘what is it?’

‘Oh.’ Jake looks down, clearly embarrassed, but she can see the beginnings of a lopsided smile, the one she really loves, and is more than a little endeared.

He lets go of her hand and touches his nose. ‘I went to that flower shop on seventh at lunch to see if they had any camellias and I don’t really know _what _camellias look like so I was smelling them all, y’know, and I guess the petals rubbed off on me – did you know that there are two hundred and fifty types of camellia-’

Camellias are Amy’s favourite flower.

Jake knows this because she told him once, on some innocuous stakeout years ago.

Jake knows this because he listened to her, even then, when they were at each other’s throats most of the time and he’d jostle her desk on purpose when she was writing reports and she’d retaliate by suggesting McGintley introduce a precinct-wide ban on whatever variant of soda he was chugging that week.

Jake knows this because even before they were friends he wanted to hear what she had to say. He respected her. He valued her.

Her mouth slackens a bit, and Jake must notice because he stops looking embarrassed and gives her a pleased, albeit bashful, smile.

‘Oh, so-?’

‘Uh – they’re in my car.’ Jake says, dismally. ‘The florist said I had to put them in water pronto, but I forgot, and they went all sad and mushy…’

It’s hard to care about that because _he bought her flowers – he bought her favourite flowers _and he looks so earnest that they just stare at each other, warm and half-lidded from the shots and the golden arc of the candlelight, and they take their third shots with crescent smiles and a tinny clink.

Three Drink Amy passes in a bit of a blur; a flurry of movement. She’s pretty sure Jake twirls her around a few times when she comes back from the restroom and at some point he makes a joke about her two left feet, but the fourth shot brings her startling back down - not quite to sobriety, but everything sharpens to a single point: Jake.

Jake in his blue dress shirt, and newly shorn hair that still curls impossibly at the edges, offset by the sheen of his skin against the flame, and that bottom lip she wants nothing more than to take between her teeth and firmly suck.

Jake looking at her hungrily, now, because her lipstick’s smeared in roses around her mouth and she’s been shifting in her seat and his pupils are blown wide, large and beckoning in his face.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Amy says, the moment the bill’s paid and he looks surprised but definitely not disappointed, not when she’s taking his hand and pulling him out of there and it’s only minutes before she has him pressed up against a little alcove nearby and is finally, finally kissing him again.

‘You sure about this, Miss “Most Appropriate”?’ Jake teases, pulling away for just a second. She rakes her eyes over his swollen lips, digs her nails in a little harder at the soft muscle in his shoulders; he stutters.

‘Do you want to stop?’

Jake answers her with a kiss of his own; through the sting of the alcohol she can taste his fervour, knows that he’ll respect her boundaries and adhere to her rules, but she equally knows that he wants this (if the half-hard length currently pressing into her thigh is any indication) and she’s leading the charge. The very thought sends a thrill through her and Jake, as though sensing this, deepens the kiss.

Somehow, he manages to hail a taxi and chokes out his address in-between Amy laying open-mouthed kisses to his neck and jawbone, but when they spill into the cab he pulls her onto his lap without a second thought.

Normally, Amy would be mortified at the thought of such drunken antics – Teddy certainly never kissed her the way Jake’s kissing her now, and definitely nowhere but the confines of their own apartments.  
  
But that’s Sober Amy’s problem and with Jake running his calloused hand up to grip her hip like that, and it feels so good, public decency is the last thing on her mind. She works him up for the rest of the cab ride, rutting against him in search of friction, caressing the sides of his face with steady thumbs, to which he stifles groans that their driver can _definitely _hear but is thankfully choosing to ignore.

‘Coffee?’ he says, with a devilish smile. It’s so like him to make a joke right now, with her lipstick smeared across his jaw and his hair hopelessly askew, chest still rising erratically, yet his meaning is clear: if she’s changed her mind they really will just perch in his tiny kitchen and drink his terrible coffee and he’ll be more than fine with that.

But that’s not what she wants.

‘Maybe in the morning,’ says Amy and he barely has chance to respond before she’s kissing him again, and this time he doesn’t hold back with the groans and it’s so hot to have him coming undone like this at her touch, to have Jake Peralta completely at her mercy and his pulse thrumming against her as she attacks his dress shirt, showering the floor with buttons until they reach the bed.

Jake twists her so that she topples onto the bed, landing on her back, and she’s barely reaching for him before he’s on top of her, and it’s so much better than the times she’d lay in bed with Teddy snoring next to her and imagine this very scenario (more times than she’ll admit, at least to Jake).  
  
He’s as attentive as he is gentle, but when she curls trembling fingers around his length, finding him hot and hard and twitching into her hand and he moans her name in a guttural rasp, she finds him vulnerable in a completely different way.

It’s not a ‘perfect’ first date by conventional means, but when she wakes up early the next morning, she’s placid; filled with an easy repose, whether it be the warmth emanating from Jake, at her very fingertips, or the way his dishevelled hair shrouds his face in curls, or the uneven heaves of his chest against her arm, and perhaps it’s the sum of all of these things, burrowed gently into her heart without her even having noticed.

So when he wriggles out of bed to make coffee, and starts crooning some old Taylor Swift rendition under his breath; when he hands her a steaming mug with a smile that’s blinding; she really couldn’t give a hoot about conventional.

**ii. car talk**

‘stakeout’

It’s an easy silence; one indicative of a good few years of established camaraderie, one which often permeates the little cavities of silence in their stakeouts.

It’s a silence far removed from the tension that’s been there, lately; tiny cracks where warm fingers slip and clumsy words slip faster, where maybe the dappled light hits his eyes just right and they’re so dark they’re almost limpid and her heart so gently eclipses.

Where maybe his tongue blades the corner of his mouth when she’s talking and if she catches it, she says nothing.

‘Gags like this? My grandpa used to call them chewing gum plays.’ Amy lowers her binoculars and a reminiscent smile curls at her lips.

‘Oh right, he was an old school cop.’ says Jake absently, and she smiles so stupidly because he might proudly proclaim he’s got the memory of a goldfish and puts more effort into beating Gina’s Kwazy Cupcakes high-score than chronologising case files, it’s Jake and he always seems to remember everything she tells him, however paltry.

She used to think it was because he was saving it all up to use as blackmail at the next Sex Crimes Christmas party. Now, the way he’s not even thought twice about the fact he knows these intimate details, the way he’s slouching behind the wheel and chewing on a stray gummy worm, she’s got a different theory.

‘But – chewing gum plays?’ says Jake. ‘Is that some kind of old-school double entendre? Amy, you dirty devil, I had no idea –’

‘It means,’ she interjects, and he cocks an eyebrow expectantly, ‘you either pull the gag off, or you just end up with gum in your hair.’

Jake snorts. ‘I can already see you with a big chunk of hair missing.’

She swats him and he grins, catching her hands and nudging them away. ‘But hey, if you need me to do the honours, I’m more than happy to oblige. I cut Gina’s hair once when we were kids.’

‘Gina let you cut her hair?’ says Amy incredulously. ‘Doesn’t she have it insured for some crazy amount of money?’

‘We were like ten,’ says Jake, taking a customary slurp of his coffee. It must be lukewarm by now, Amy thinks with a tang of disapproval, but he doesn’t seem to mind. A lone drop spills from the corner of his mouth, and there’s that wretched tongue flick again, wet and pink and she really, really shouldn’t be having these thoughts.

‘Gina bet me that I couldn’t bubble wrap everything in the principal’s office without getting caught.’ says Jake, beaming at Amy’s anticipated jaw-drop. ‘Not only did I totally nail it, but I rigged elevator music to play through the speakers. Forfeit was I got to cut her hair.’

‘And here I was thinking you just got bored one day.’ Amy sighs, but she’s smiling loosely, watching stars of dust trail through the stream of light from Jake’s side of the car.

He’s worrying his lip through his own smile, a classic Jake quirk.

‘There was plenty of that.’ Jake takes the binoculars from her lap; she shifts involuntarily in her seat and hopes he didn’t notice. ‘Gina used to come up with the craziest shit for us to do, since we didn’t really have parents around to stop us. Usually involved me doing stupid stuff to get her friends’ numbers.’ he wriggles his eyebrows.

‘What are you, Peralta, twelve?’

‘On a scale of one to ten, yeah,’ Jake says without hesitation, smirking in tandem with her reluctant smile.

‘So…’ he says, after a few minutes of silence. She furrows her brow. ‘What did you get up to last night? I assume you don’t dress like that for going over your weekly budget.’

Amy deliberates for a brief moment, weighing up the pros and cons of offering herself up for his childish teasing. Truthfully, she kind of wants to know what he’ll say.

‘I was on a date.’

For a split second, she thinks Jake’s face falls, but the customary shit-eating grin slips back in place.

‘And who was this unfortunate man with extremely low standards and poor judgment?’

‘Tom is a lawyer. And he’s smart, and professional, and-’

‘Oh yeah? Did he show you his briefs?’ Jake interrupts.

She snorts and shakes her head.

‘No, c’mon, really. How was it?’ he asks. She knows him well enough to recognise his nervous tics; the fake-casual tone, the feigned disinterest, his fingers drumming on the dashboard.

‘It went really well, I’ll have you know.’ Amy says staunchly. She hesitates. Jake waits.

‘I didn’t let him order for me and he went on a ten minute rant about how nice guys never win…I stuffed some breadsticks into my purse and left.’ Amy sighs.

‘What a tool,’ Jake says, but he has an odd look on his face; almost, she thinks, as though he’s torn between annoyance on her behalf, and well, there’s no way he’s happy that her date didn’t go well, is there?

‘Seriously Amy, he sounds like an idiot. You’re…y’know.’ he flaps his hands around, cheeks colouring.

‘Yeah.’ Amy says, not entirely sure whether she’s touched or confused. She can’t help feeling glum; her dates – the ones Jake doesn’t accidentally show up to and intentionally crash – haven’t been going well lately.

‘What about you?’ she adds, because she is a detective, and he still smells faintly of cheap cologne and alright, she heard him discussing last night’s plans with Boyle in the breakroom but for some funny reason, she wants to hear it from him.

‘Oh, I had a date too,’ Jake says, but for once he doesn’t sound smug. ‘Definitely not as lame as yours though. She’s a water slide tester.’

‘That’s a job?’ Amy says incredulously, and to her surprise, Jake starts laughing.

‘You said that in exactly the voice I told her you’d use.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Oh, I mean…I was just telling her about my job, and you’re my partner, so obviously your name came up in passing.’ Jake says, far too quickly and rather unconvincingly.

‘Right. Well, that’s…great.’ says Amy, knowing it sounds hollow. ‘She sounds right up your alley.’

‘Not really.’ Jake shrugs, and all of a sudden he looks very intense, sombre. It’s jarring that he’s not launched into braggadocio or found a way to gloat about managing to pull off a date despite his terrible finances. ‘She wasn’t my type.’

Amy’s about to make a comment about how she seems exactly his type; cool, quirky, has some ridiculous job that Jake would predictably covet, but something stops her. Something maybe she’s not ready to really think about yet.

They don’t speak much for the rest of the stakeout.

For once, she’s content to sit in Jake’s disgusting car; even if it does smell like wet dog and has jelly stains on the leather that probably aren’t even dry; even if the seatbelts don’t work properly and there are bird feathers stuck to the footwells.

It’s nice to just be in his company.

x

‘heart shaped bruises’

Amy watches Jake’s silhouette, stilled at the way the mellow evening light hits the sharp hinge of his jaw and illuminates his mop of curls which tremble against his forehead with the wind. Karen’s smiling; Jake shifts so that his face is no longer in sight and she can tell he’s talking by the tremors in his cheek.

She wonders if he’s telling his mother about Amy, that he loves her.

She wonders if maybe he doesn’t need to.

Eventually, they part, and Jake walks back to the car with a crooked half-smile and a glint in his eye that means more serious topics than blue cake and nose rings were discussed, but it’s her boyfriend’s birthday and she wants to thumb over every tiny fissure Roger left on his heart until they’re nothing more than dust in the wind.

‘I’ll put the heat on,’ Jake says as he slots the key into the ignition, wincing as Amy starfishes her hands to make sure they still work. ‘Sorry I was talking to her for so long.’

‘Jake, it’s your mom.’ says Amy, but she smiles when he cranks up the heat all the way without waiting to be prompted and quickly takes one of her poor cold hands in his own.

‘Thanks for coming.’ he says, and it’s the sincerity in his voice and the supernova cut of the brown in his eyes when he looks at her that makes her heart shudder. ‘I know my family’s kind of…fucked up.’ he stares down at the steering wheel. ‘But I guess you knew that already.’

‘Jake.’ Amy says again, and waits until he meets her gaze before continuing. He looks uncertain.

A restless tension beats in his neck.

She knows what he means, what he’s trying to say, and she hates it. ‘Your family isn’t fucked up. _You’re _not fucked up. Your dad is an asshole. You couldn’t be any less like him if you tried.’

Jake doesn’t say anything, but his hand is suddenly wrapped so tightly around Amy’s that his knuckles whiten.

They sit there, Amy’s face stained a sweet pink as Jake studies her intently, for a long moment, until she gently pries off his hand, and with it, the silence.

‘I’m actually pretty warm now.’ Amy peels off her cardigan, as Jake looks on, brow furrowed. ‘I don’t think I need my cardigan anymore. Or any other layers…’

She can practically feel him stiffening in his seat, his eyes bugging, as she pulls delicately at her dress to reveal a very lacy, very red bra and the smile she gives him is flavoured with the suggestion of what else she might be wearing with it.

Amy’s never felt particularly self-assured when it comes to seduction of boyfriends; maybe that’s a mark of how limp and pallid her prior relationships have been compared to this one, though, because the way Jake makes her feel when they’re intimate is loved, _revered_, through every hot, trembling touch.

Right now, his mouth hangs a little agape, his pupils are dark and heady and flick erratically between her face and her breasts, and his hands are twitching with, she knows, the sting of the urge to touch her.

‘Happy birthday.’ says Amy, with a smile that’s, impossibly, both soft and sultry.

The tip of his tongue marks the edge of his lip in an instant and then his mouth is enclosing on hers; he’s suddenly, overwhelmingly in her space and he tastes like artificial cake, frothy and sweet. His fingers press intently at her cheekbones, cupping her face to his as he kisses her hungrily, before they hover tantalisingly at the strap of her bra.

‘Jake,’ Amy says breathily, when he pulls roughly away to suck hard at that tender spot on her clavicle. It turns both of them on, Amy a little shamefacedly, to see the purpling on her neck the next day, even if it does mean she has to wear turtlenecks to work for the next week.

‘Ames, I’m doing some of my best work here.’ Jake mumbles against her skin.

‘I just made a perfect impression on your mom and I’m not ruining it by having sex with you in her driveway.’ says Amy indignantly, although she pouts a little when he pulls away, instantly cold.

‘Okay okay okay – we should go home,’ says Jake hoarsely, jaw slackening even as he speaks, struggling to turn the engine on. ‘Like…right now. Yeah.’

They _do _make it back to his apartment. They don’t make it to his bed.

x

‘cradle me, I'll cradle you’

He’s uncharacteristically quiet when he drops her off that morning.

A ten-day suspension will do that to someone though, especially when they’re as easily bored and restless as Jake is.

‘You okay?’ Amy asks as she unbuckles her seatbelt. He’s not, of course he’s not; that’s part of the reason she’s spent every single one of the eight nights since he got suspended at his apartment (also because she hates sleeping without him now, even this early into their relationship).

‘Yeah,’ he says, and when she doesn’t respond, just watches him, he sighs and smiles, reluctantly. ‘Your perp-stare is something else, y’know.’

‘I know.’ Amy says primly, before she grabs his hand. ‘You did the right thing, Jake, you know that, right? You were trying to help Captain Holt. Don’t beat yourself up.’

‘He won’t even talk to me.’ Jake says, running his hand through his hair in desperation. ‘I shouldn’t have tried to fuck everything up with the Vulture – he just makes me so _mad_-’

‘Me too.’ says Amy, gritting her teeth as she recalls the four hours she spent planning their captain’s birthday party, only for him to turn around and spit in her face. ‘I hate him as well. But this isn’t permanent. You’re going to catch the Oolong Slayer and get Holt back. I’ll help you when I get back, okay?’

Jake looks at her for a long moment, as though he wants to say something but knows better; but the look is so tender and dare she say, loving, that it barely registers.

‘Thanks, Ames. I dunno what I’d do without you.’

She grins and reaches for her handbag in the backseat, but he blocks her with his arm and pulls her in for a kiss, keeping it relatively chaste since they are in the NYPD parking lot and anyone, including their superiors, could walk by, but it’s heartfelt and gentle and she’s still daintily aflush, still tickled by the butterflies.

When she breaks the kiss, his lips are poised and brow smoothed in that way, so she knows he’s about to make some stupid joke.

‘That reminds me, what was it you told all of our colleagues was your worst nightmare?’ Jake says with a smirk, before giving a theatrical gasp. ‘Oh right – “being one of those girls in Jake’s car”, wasn’t it? How’s that working out for you, huh Santiago?’

Amy attempts to silence him into submission with a searing glare and a stiff upper-lip, but he just bares his teeth at her in a grin.

‘Now you’re the only girl in my car.’ he says, and it’s only because he sounds so proud, his eyes alight with the very tangible notion of them, together; there’s no semblance of that distant yearning, gone is the sad aftertaste of his smiles when she’d leave the precinct early for a date with Teddy or mention him in passing… that her annoyance simply dissipates on the spot.

‘Yeah. Lucky me.’ she says, and his eyes rove her face, as though bracing himself for some crevice of sarcasm, but Amy just smiles and rubs her palm over his knuckles, and when she leans in to kiss him, she’s really saying, this isn’t nothing, this is real.

When she pulls away, his lips swell with a thousand unspoken promises and not for the first time, Amy thinks about the possibility of forever.

And not for the first time, she swallows it, because it’s only been a few weeks and it’s still scarily new and she doesn’t want to lose the way the first thing he does in the morning is roll over and kiss her through the groggy seven a.m. haze or how he’s started wearing that one blue plaid shirt 1.5 times more frequently since she said she liked it or, being honest, the stupid-good sex.

‘Have a good day at work.’ says Jake, nudging her out of her reverie, he beams at her to show that he means it, even if he’s going back to wallow in an empty apartment and she gets to go and chase bad guys.

‘Okay babe,’ she says, already far happier than she was this morning when he didn’t even want to poke his head above the covers. He’s still wearing the sticker she gave him for waking up, which makes her heart swell (said method of waking him up proved very popular and she won’t be surprised if he becomes ‘reluctant’ to wake up more regularly in the future). ‘You too.’

He doesn’t drive away until she’s disappeared through the entrance.

**iii. compromise**

‘stars in our eyes'

They’re both tired when they finally leave the precinct; Jake from working half the night to get Charles’ potential new girlfriend reprieved, Amy from her PR disaster and then getting an earful from the Vulture for not clearing her temporary absence with him first.

‘I hate him.’ she grumbles, as Jake wraps an arm around her and she folds into his warmth.

‘He’s the worst. Like, if Hans Gruber and The Shredder and Richard Thornburg all got rolled into one super awful dude, the Vulture would still be the worst dude ever.’

Amy rolls her eyes, but doesn’t disagree.

‘Yours or mine?’ she says, and he swears his heart skips a beat at the nonchalance, that she doesn’t even question spending another night with him. He’ll certainly never question it; now he knows what it’s like to wake up with her, soft hair strewn across her face and her cold feet tucked into his, he doesn’t want to comprehend the alternative.

‘I’ve got no groceries in.’ he admits, but it doesn’t feel like a failure, because Amy just smiles and squeezes his hand.

‘We can stop by the bodega near yours. I need a few things anyway.’

So that’s what they do. And here’s a perhaps unsurprising revelation; Jake has always hated grocery shopping. He hates that there are so many different brands for every one simple thing and never knows which one to buy; he hates handing over his card and praying it won’t be declined, and he hates how he just slings the nearest, edible looking stuff into his basket and pays as quickly as he can.

But, in an even less surprising turn of events; he’s very quickly growing to love grocery shopping when he gets to do it with Amy.

Really, he’s just following her around as she scrutinises bottles and cartons and spends at least five minutes reading the labels on each one before it makes its way into their basket.

Only Jake’s mainly entranced by the way she scrunches her nose as she reads the ingredients, the way her hair shines in the ugly fluorescent lighting; her happy little smile when she locates the exact item. For once, he’s not paying attention to what he’s even taking off the shelves himself not because he can’t be bothered, but because this one, incredible thought is circling his mind – _she’s mine_.

He’s constantly struck by how beautiful she is; but when she grabs a spare toothbrush – a fancy electric one – and smiles at him, when he picks her favourite type of peanut butter off the shelf without so much as a prompt and she kisses him lightly on the cheek; the other implications are startlingly clear.

Her, them, this is real.

It's real when he smears toothpaste foam all over his mouth and she'll dodge his kisses, laughing, but eventually let him nuzzle into her neck. It's real when they're in the elevator at the precinct and she'll peck the tip of his nose before the doors open. It's real when they bump into Kylie after a late night at Shaw's and she calls him her boyfriend with unabashed affection.

And suddenly, Jake doesn’t care about the Vulture, or his decomposition of everything he’s worked for. He forgets about Holt’s absence, and the way it presses, unrelenting, on his chest. Because here is Amy, right there in front of him, and God, she still tastes like everything he’s ever wanted, and all he knows is the lull of her voice as she whispers his name, bringing him back to reality.

‘That’s everything.’ Amy checks the list she scribbled on the way over. ‘Let’s-’

‘Hey, hey, I’ll get it. Responsible boyfriend right here.’ Jake says, suddenly grinning all over, so that his cheeks are punctured with those tiny dimples she loves to press with her fingers, and Amy’s powerless against that smile (something Jake has figured that out by this point and admittedly, uses it to his own advantage way too often), so she shrugs and kisses his dimpled chin and goes to unlock the car.

The store clerk’s stoic expression remains intact even when Jake manages to scatter all their combined items over the counter and, in trying to stack them back up neatly, snaps the cap off of Amy’s fancy-schmancy shampoo (which delays the entire checkout process by another five minutes).

‘That’ll be $52.69.’

‘Oh – uh…’ Jake scrabbles for his wallet, and looks dismally at the scrappy leather. He’s pretty sure he has about $7 to his name, and that’s without factoring in the family pack of Lucky Charms he impulsively bought and ate out of the box two days ago when Amy had to work a night shift and he was alone and missing her badly. ‘You know, um, I’m just gonna put some of this stuff back.’

The clerk doesn’t say anything, just nods and gestures to the next customer, so Jake slips past and pauses by the sale displays, staring into his basket.

He stands in thought for about three seconds.

He reaches into the basket and takes out his orange soda. Which is followed by the 6-disc Die Hard special edition set he spotted at the entrance. And then the hard candies.

Jake sifts through the rest of the items, removing most of the things he’d excitedly tossed in there whilst Amy shook her head good-naturedly, and tosses them haphazardly onto their shelves. All of Amy’s things remain, quite firmly, in the basket.

He silently prays his card won’t be declined whilst distractedly glancing out of the windows to make sure Amy isn’t on her way back inside, wondering what’s taking him so long (he supposes he’s built up a reputation of perpetual lateness for this exact purpose).

‘You were a while.’ Amy says, a little conspicuously, when he throws the grocery bag onto the backseat and clambers into the passenger side.

‘Had to make sure you got the right toothbrush.’ says Jake. ‘I know how you are about your soft bristles.’

She doesn’t say anything, but there’s a knowing look in her eyes; and later that evening when they slump onto the sofa together, limbs entangled, she rests her head on his shoulder and maybe he’s half-asleep and delirious but the huff of her breath sounds strangely like, ‘I love you.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE’RE GETTING A SEASON 8 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! nothing else matters
> 
> I read that camellias mean ‘you’re a flame in my heart’ and they also symbolise longing, affection, and of course love, and if that’s not jake and amy…<3 plus they probably remind amy of her mother (‘camila’) ok bye
> 
> p.s. you can find me crying about the b99 s8 renewal & how much I LOVE this show on tumblr @vic-kovac


	3. three more dreams of you and mistletoe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three times Jake & Amy's Christmases intertwine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from 'one more sleep' (leona lewis)

i. three more wishes (i can barely breathe)

It’s December first, and that means one thing. The one desk decoration that Santiago allows herself at any given time is positioned perfectly besides her computer monitor.

Oh, and it’s super awful and hideous, and Jake hates it.

Normally, to Jake’s annoyance, Santiago is _meticulous _in ensuring perfection in everything she does; she uses personalised stationary and complains on a tri-weekly basis about the starchy hand sanitiser in the bathrooms and more than once has she returned new fountain pens because the nibs were ‘too scratchy’. They’ve only known each other for two years but Jake quickly came to understand after knowing her for two minutes that Amy Santiago likes things just so.

But apparently she, like everybody else, is prone to the occasional lapse in judgment. Only this is a pretty epic lapse, because Jake’s going to spend the next four weeks glowering at a gold Santa in a sparkly fishing boat holding a bendy metal rod and grinning ghoulishly.

‘Bleuuugh,’ Jake sticks his tongue out, and then waggles it for good measure. ‘Bad news everyone, Santiago’s got her terrible Santa-on-steroids decoration out again. Think of my eyes, Amy, _my eyes_.’

‘It’s seasonally appropriate.’ says Amy, neatly sliding into her chair, already armed with a disinfectant wipe for her daily desk sanitisation. ‘I don’t understand why you hate it so much.’

‘It’s gross. And ugly. And was definitely designed by some disgraced employee on his last day as a final act of revenge.’ says Jake, in a matter-of-fact way.

‘Kylie gave this to me.’ says Amy with a pout, eyebrows knotting together so that she almost looks _cute_ with those big crestfallen eyes and a soft downturned lip.

(Nope. Definitely not. He’s just been looking at that ugly Santa ornament for too long, so anything would look cute in comparison).

‘Even more reason to toss that nasty thing in the ever-growing landfill of Amy’s things that need burning.’ Gina calls, peering over her phone screen to flash a saccharine smile.

Amy scowls, but makes no effort to move her awful Santa-in-a-fishing-boat ornament.

‘Is that a real thing?’ asks Charles, pausing conspicuously by Gina’s desk in an ill-disguised attempt to slip something into her photocopying pile. She stabs the paper with her nail file and sends it skidding back towards him with a flourish.

‘Uh, are Scully’s diet pills definitely a scam?’

‘Actually, I’ve lost two ounces this week,’ Scully says proudly, nodding at Gina. ‘Although that might just be the wart I had removed from my-’

‘Anyway!’ Jake coughs, loudly, as his colleagues recoil in a synthesis of revulsion. ‘Back to the point, Amy, this is a shared desk, and frankly I think that you would desecrate it in this manner without asking me first is probably a violation of some police code somewhere.’

‘Desecrate?’ Amy repeats, quirking an eyebrow.

‘I know words.’ Jake says defensively. Off her look, he adds, ‘Aaaand two perps in the holding cell were having a conversation about festive graffiti earlier and it seemed like it might work in this context. It’s amazing what you can learn from criminals.’ Behind him, Terry buries his head in his hands.

‘I don’t complain about…_this_,’ says Amy, gesturing to the mountain of police toys, Rubix cubes and dinosaurs littering Jake’s side of the desk. ‘How can you seriously object to one Christmas decoration when it’s rarely a day goes by that I don’t find some item of your crap on my desk?’

‘She has a point.’ Charles chimes in, before quickly recanting at Jake’s look of shock at this unprecedented betrayal. ‘But it is terrible, Amy. It’s the kind of thing my grandmother would use to try and give me nightmares. She was trying to “toughen me up”.’ He pauses. ‘It didn’t work.’

‘You know what? I don’t care if you all hate it.’ says Amy, folding her arms in a classic Santiago power pose. ‘It’s staying.’

McGintley chooses that moment to hobble out of his office and ask if anyone fancies going on a burger run, effectively ending the conversation.

x

Over the next few days, Jake easily falls into the rhythm of his usual teasing. He moves the Santa around Amy’s desk; it starts off teetering on the top of her computer monitor and by Friday morning has migrated to the microwave, leaving a very confused Scully standing gormlessly with his bag of popcorn for a good half-hour before Amy retrieves it.

It’s all in good humour though, because as much as Jake hates that Santa (and he really, really hates it) he wouldn’t ever really do anything to upset Amy, like take a jackhammer to it.

(Alright, have Rosa take a jackhammer to it. Whatever).

He just _craves_ the sweetness of her silvery little laugh when she locates the Santa every morning.

Which is why it’s strange when Santiago comes storming over to him on the following Monday afternoon. She should be floating on air, because she’s just extracted a confession from a perp they spent two months tracking down, and this means it’s paperwork time, which is Santiago’s favourite time of the day.

But instead she’s towering over him in her chunky heeled boots with hollowed cheeks and a line stiff between her eyebrows and her dark eyes full of fire.

‘Alright, where is it, Peralta?’

‘Buh…what now, huh?’ Jake blinks, not even having to feign innocence for once. ‘Where is what, Santiago?’

‘My Santa ornament that you hate so much.’ she jams her fists down on his desk. ‘I know you’ve hidden it, and I’ve been looking for it all morning and I _can’t find _it!’

‘Uh, I put it on the hood of your car this morning and you found it five minutes later.’ says Jake, holding up his hands. ‘If it’s moved since then it has nothing to do with me. I like that you suspect me though, I’d be a great cat burglar-’

‘Jake.’ Amy says, in a tone so sharp it brings him startling back down to earth in an instant. ‘Just tell me where it is.’

‘Amy, I honestly don’t know.’ Jake says, standing up and placing a steady hand on her shoulder, his jaw set solemnly. ‘Maybe the doll dropped out of the Annabelle sequel and they needed a replacement.’

Amy doesn’t laugh, or even crack a tentative smile, like he expected. Her face sort of crumples a little, and it goes right through Jake’s heart and he falters, jaw coming apart and fingers slackening, and he can’t tell you why seeing Amy so sad is having such a profound effect on him but he does know that he’ll do whatever he has to in order to chase it away and see her smile again.

‘Alright, Santiago.’ Jake sighs, heaving himself out of his chair with effort. ‘As the best detective in this precinct, I’ll solve this crime and return your terrible Santa to its rightful owner.’ he places a splayed hand to his chest.

‘I already looked everywhere, Jake. _Everywhere._’ Amy says, with a dismal frown.

‘Just leave it with me, kay? But I’m gonna need you to cover for me with McGintley.’

Amy casts a weary eye over to their captain’s office before raising her eyebrows. They both know that the precinct could be engulfed in flames and McGintley would be happily toasting marshmallows from his desk chair.

‘Sure. Uh - thanks, Peralta.’ she says, a tad gingerly, and it’s maybe the first time she’s acted shy around him, but there’s no time to tease her about it because his brilliant brain his shifting into ‘solve’ mode.

First step? Gather the evidence, of course. The security cam footage from the bullpen is the most obvious place to start: only Terry rounds on him whilst he’s knee-deep in precinct files in the evidence lock-up.

Jake cracks immediately.

‘So this isn’t for an active case?’ says Terry, brow furrowed.

‘Not specifically.’

‘So it’s for a closed case then?’

‘Nooooope, no.’

‘Peralta.’

‘I’m trying to find out who took Amy’s Santa.’ says Jake, exasperatedly. ‘I just need to watch one teensy little bit of footage and then we can all get on with our work as usual.’

‘Everyone else _is _getting on with their work as usual.’ says Terry. ‘But I can tell you’re up to something and it’s making me nervous, and when I’m nervous I can’t digest properly which means I have to skip lunch. And Terry _hates _skipping lunch.’

‘I’m trying to find Santiago’s Santa.’ Jake interjects. As much as he loves Terry, he has neither the time or the patience to listen to the sergeant lament his loss of carb-loading. ‘It’s gone missing.’

‘Am I having a stroke? Or have you not spent the last week hiding that damn thing in every nook and cranny of this precinct?’

‘Yeah, but someone must have swiped it this morning after Amy found it.’

‘Oh.’ Terry shudders involuntarily, eyes shifting. ‘That’s - unfortunate.’

‘You hate it too, huh?’ Jake grins toothily.

‘The point is,’ Terry says, ignoring him, ‘I don’t see how this is a productive use of your time. Aren’t you supposed to be working on that Fulton Street assault?’

‘C’mon, Sarge, I promised Santiago I’d get it back for her.’

‘Hmm.’ Terry eyes him. ‘Got it.’ before Jake can say anything else - because he doesn’t like the insinuation there - Sergeant Jeffords ushers him out of the evidence lock-up.

‘You need an admin code to get the bullpen security footage.’ says Terry. ‘And you and I both know that there’s only one person in this precinct that you’ve got any chance of getting one of those from. And that’s where I leave you.’ Terry slaps him on the back - a bone cracks loudly and Jake grimaces - and departs, leaving him alone to groan inwardly and wonder why, again, he’s going to all this trouble.

Oh, right. Santiago and her stupid sad face and doe-eyes like cut charcoal, large and glassy in the watery stream of sunlight that hits their desk in the late afternoon -

Jake scratches the back of his neck, and shakes his head as though to displace that thought.

x

‘I’m gonna stop you right there, kid.’ deadpans Gina, pointing a single, manicured finger at Jake, who’s made two steps in her direction. It’s really more of a shiny pink dagger at this point. _Ooh, Pink Dagger. Now that’s a cool name for - _right. Focus. Amy’s stolen Santa-thingy.

‘Unless this is about the fifty dollars you owe me, you better turn around and hop on that way, because I’m auctioning Hitchcock’s toupee on craigslist and the bidding is starting to get interesting.’

‘What? I don’t owe you fifty dollars.’ says Jake incredulously.

‘Mm hmm, sure you do.’ says Gina, waving her personal organiser at him. ‘See here, “November 18th, Jake lost fifty dollar bet with me. Sucker”. Pay up, buttercup.’

‘What bet?’ Jake cries. He learned his lesson on gambling with Gina years ago, when she duped him out of a month’s salary with some dodgy bet that involved a pogo stick, a bowling ball and a trip to the hospital.

‘Eh, not really sure.’ Gina shrugs. ‘But it’s in the book, so it’s law now.’

Jake shakes his head in frustration. ‘Whatever, that isn’t what I came to talk to you about. I need you to access the security cam footage for the bullpen from this morning. Can you do that?’

‘Uh, I can definitely do that.’ says Gina, narrowing her eyes as Jake beams with relief. ‘_If _you tell me why.’

‘I’m trying to find out who took Amy’s hideous Santa.’ says Jake impatiently. ‘So if you can just-’

‘You _hate _Amy’s Santa.’ says Gina, eyes slowly flitting up to scrutinise him. He can feel his cheeks rouging with unwelcome warmth. ‘You haven’t shut up about that thing since the first time she came prancing in here with it.’

‘So what?’

‘So why are you going full-on “Detective Peralta” trying to find it? If I didn’t know better I’d think _you _had it stowed away in some creepy shrine somewhere.’

Jake swallows, but is careful not to hesitate. If Gina smells blood, he’s done for. ‘Because Santiago is miserable and if she doesn’t get her normal amount of paperwork done this precinct will grind to a halt. She practically keeps this city running with her fancy penmanship.’

‘Right.’ Gina says, with an accompanying smile that bares enough teeth to register as sinister and leaves Jake feeling oddly unsettled. ‘So no other reason, then?’

‘Hey!’ Hitchcock exclaims, suddenly, as ‘minesweeper’ implodes on his computer screen. ‘You can’t sell my hair!’

Unfortunately, Gina spends nearly twenty minutes trying to access the precinct’s security footage before she finally groans in defeat.

‘The files are corrupted.’ she says, before quickly feigning nonchalance. ‘Or something. Sorry, kiddo.’

‘What?’ Jake rounds Gina’s desk before she can stop him and stares blankly at the screen. Amy’s out on a stakeout with Charles, at least, so he’s got some time. ‘Can’t you, I don’t know, work your Gina-ness on it?’

‘Jake, I am a highly complex and spiritual being. My powers of persuasion are above such rudimentary machines such as these.’

‘Okay, well can you call your friend down in the evidence archives and have him see if he can find it?’

‘Do I look like a receptionist?’

‘Uh -’ Jake hesitates, unsure how to play this one.

‘Ughhughhhh,’ Gina’s exaggerated moan reverberates around the bullpen. The sirens on Jake’s toy police car start blinking rapidly. ‘Fine, I’ll do your stupid chores, but you’ll owe me one, lover boy.’

‘Nope, no, just no.’ Jake says in rapid succession as Gina starts punching numbers into her phone.

‘Hi Frank, it’s Gina…my business venture? It’s going wonderfully, but that’s not what I’m calling to talk about…I’m trying to locate a missing item-’

It’s useless. Gina hangs up minutes later, shaking her head; for once, not poised to make some snarky comment. Jake exhales sharply through his nose and takes off towards the breakroom.

x

An hour or so later, and Amy returns, Charles bobbing behind her. Jake has still made no progress in the missing Santa case, but he has uncovered the whereabouts of McGintley’s spare glasses, Charles’ ukulele that Terry swore up and down he saw a perp make off with, and a scuffed pink ballet slipper that Rosa had promptly snatched from him and mumbled some flimsy excuse about her niece.

‘You doing okay, Pineapples?’ says Amy idly, gesturing to Jake’s unkempt hair. She slides over a coffee cup which Jake takes and drains half of without really thinking about it.

‘This is the real unsolvable case.’ he grumbles, leafing through the lost-and-found records for what must be the fiftieth time.

‘You’re still looking for that dumb singing Santa?’ Rosa snorts as she emerges from the breakroom. ‘You realise we have actual cases to solve, right?’

‘This _is_ a case, Diaz.’ Jake says gravely. ‘It may well be the most important case to ever pass through these two hands.’

Rosa exchanges glances with Amy, who shrugs noncommittally and quickly looks back down at her own paperwork.

‘I’m still not convinced Jake didn’t just take it as some stupid elaborate joke and has now forgotten where he hid it.’ says Rosa, ripping her mouse out from the socket after a few attempts at moving it.

‘We’ve already established that I didn’t - hang on.’ Jake says slowly, running a hand through his dishevelled hair, which sprouts from his head in odd clumps. ‘Gina, earlier you said that you’d have blamed me for taking it if you didn’t quote unquote, already know better.’

‘Yeah, so?’ is the monotone response.

‘So how could you know better unless _you _know who took it, which you _do, _because _it was you all along!’ _ Jake pounds a clenched fist onto the desk, slopping warm coffee everywhere, but he’s too fired up to care now.

‘Come on, Jake, Gina knows the workplace rules about her colleagues’ belongings and wouldn’t -’

‘Took you long enough.’ Gina says, cutting Terry off, before reaching into her handbag and pulling out Amy’s Santa. ‘I was starting to think I’d actually have to keep this thing.’

Amy appears at Gina’s desk and retrieves it, simultaneously undertaking a subtle inspection for damage. Satisfied, she turns to face Gina with her best ‘perp intimidation’ face. For a few tense moments it seems that Gina won’t crack, but then she rolls her eyes and relays something about being bored and wanting to keep her neighbourhood’s cops on their feet.

‘And you’re _ah_-welcome,’ Jake bows as Amy approaches him. He can see the ghost of a smile at the edge of her mouth and her cheeks are kissed pink. For a moment he wonders if she’s going to hug him and panics because what if her hair smells as good as it looks and he embarrasses himself by getting flustered because it’s _Amy_ but instead she just pats him on the shoulder a little awkwardly.

‘Thanks, Peralta.’ she says. ‘Sorry you spent all day on a wild goose chase.’

‘Don’t be.’ Jake says, recovering himself with relative ease. ‘Consider that fifty years’ worth of birthday and Christmas presents and a substantial contribution to your mortgage.’

Later though, she corners him at the bar in Shaw’s when their nosy colleagues are tucked away in some dusty booth and he can barely hear her above the comfortable din of the other patrons.

‘I’ll get these,’ she says, and he’s in no position to argue what with crushing debt, so he puts his wallet away whilst the bartender smiles at Amy in a greasy way that makes his stomach crawl.

‘Thanks for today, Jake.’ she says as they manoeuvre the drinks onto a tray. ‘Really.’

‘It’s cool.’ Jake says nonchalantly. ‘As long as you’re ready to admit I’m a better detective now. Otherwise we’ll have to find some other way to settle it.’

For a minute Amy looks at him, her gaze holding him in a way that blots out the buzz of the few drinks he’s had already. Then she leans up and kisses him - briefly - on the cheek. It’s short and sweet and probably dust to her by the time she reaches the others at their table, so Jake does himself a favour and doesn’t think about how the soft sear of her lips lingers on his skin.

He joins his friends and is careful not to look at Amy too much, and not for the first time wonders when things started to change between them.

x

A couple of years later, on December first, Jake and Amy walk into the precinct holding hands, squabbling over whose Christmas present for whom will be greater and Jake’s about to decree that if his is better they make watching ‘Die Hard’ a Christmas day tradition, when Gina clears her throat meaningfully and Jake suddenly stops short, dropping Amy’s hand.

‘Where is it?’

‘Where’s what?’ Amy asks, depositing her handbag beneath her desk.

‘The stupid Santa thing that Jake spent an entire day looking for and simultaneously trying to convince himself and all of us that he didn’t have a huge pathetic crush on you. Jake, for once in your life, don’t say a word.’ Gina says, as Jake opens his mouth, presumably to protest.

‘I couldn’t find it.’ Amy says mildly, easing her coffee cup out of its cardboard wrap to enclose her cold fingers around the rim.

‘And you’re not freaking out?’ Rosa says, with a disbelieving cough.

‘It probably got mixed up with all of Jake’s stuff.’ says Amy. ‘There are still three boxes we haven’t unpacked yet.’ she adds, but when she meets his eyes it’s only affection brimming bright and buoyant there.

Amy does discover the whereabouts of the hideous-ugly-awful Santa ornament that evening, when they get in from work to their newly shared apartment.

It’s Jake, that proudly shows her the terrible Santa, that he’s already displayed on top of their shared mantelpiece, his, and hers, and theirs, but it’s Amy that kisses him softly through the gentle thrum of her heart and rests her head against his shoulder with the final affirmation firm in her mind. She is officially in love with Jake Peralta.

ii. dreams of you (and mistletoe)

In years past, Amy has always held a slight dread as December crept up. Holidays are almost always spent at the Santiagos’ childhood home, and with each passing year there are new partners and weddings, and more recently, children. And as much as Amy loves her brothers, nieces and nephews, she’s never quite been able to escape the heartburn of turning up alone.

(Of course, they won’t end up going to her parents’ house for Christmas, after Jake has his epic-but-also-kinda-terrifying Die Hard hostage experience. Amy texts her mom that evening whilst Jake anchors the blankets around them and they just sit holding each other on the sofa, watching decidedly non-death related Christmas films. If Jake notices that Amy’s curled around him extra tightly, he doesn’t say, just presses the occasional kiss to her temple.)

So when she and Jake become official, Amy is determined to make their first Christmas together perfect. Jake, naturally, is happy just to be spending all his free time with her and isn’t quite as particular as she is about finding the best festive candle (‘Ames, they all smell the same to me!’) or finding the right wreath for her apartment door (‘Amy, feel my wreath! Get it? _Wrath_?’).

But that’s not to say he doesn’t get into the spirit of things. For one, he buys them matching advent calendars and insists that they open them together every morning. So then naturally Amy has to kiss the chocolate off of his lips, and cheeks, and occasionally his nose.

She’s pretty sure he gets chocolate all over his face for exactly that reason, but who is she to complain?

For another, Jake goes absolutely overboard on the mistletoe. The first time, Amy gets home to her apartment on Jake’s day off and he’s waiting at the doorstep, grinning all over his face and pointing upwards to the cheerful green sprig.

But then naturally, it becomes a competition. Amy opens the cupboard for her morning granola and nearly gets poked in the eye with the mistletoe Jake’s pinned on the inside door. She’ll stomp around the apartment in a bad mood after her neighbour’s horrible girlfriend makes a rude comment, and Jake will be there when she turns around, holding the stupid stuff and ready to sweetly kiss the anger away.

The culmination of this, of course, is when she opens her pre-packed sandwich in the precinct breakroom and Jake has tucked a handful of mistletoe into the container.

So of course she has to kiss him, because it’s Christmas and for once, who cares about professionalism. And then somehow that’s the whole of their lunch break gone.

And when Amy gets on a ladder to put up the bullpen’s Christmas lights, Jake actively tries to help her.

‘Jake, your track record with ladders isn’t exactly great. I don’t need to remind you about the basketball incident.’

‘The one time I got on one, I fell out of it. That’s one hundred percent, Amy. That’s an A plus.’

He does offer to catch her if she falls though.

When they pick their tree, though, Jake is just as excited as she is to go to the tree place together and doesn’t complain once about her spending ages finding the right one. She suspects it has something to do with Jake’s childhood festivities being severely limited after his dad left, and doesn’t budge from beneath his arm the entire time.

‘There.’ Amy says, stepping back to admire their work. ‘Perfect, right?’

‘Perfect.’ Jake agrees, and maybe it’s just the light reflecting from the baubles, slight and gold, but his whole face is illuminated with happiness as he looks back at her.

It makes Amy’s heart lurch; she would do anything to keep that smile on his face, especially when holidays have, until now, never been her boyfriend’s favourite time of the year.

‘I think the Die Hard memorabilia really makes it.’ says Jake, pulling Amy gently from her reverie and into his arms. ‘Bet you never thought you’d have that on your tree.’

Amy smiles against his sleeve. ‘It’s not as horrifying as I expected it to be.’

‘Now it doesn’t look just like any other tree.’ Jake’s voice is muffled as he mumbles into her hair; she can feel him breathing her scent in, steadily.

‘You’re right, it - wait.’ Amy suddenly jolts away from him. ‘Jake, the lights are wonky!’

‘No they’re not.’ Jake says quickly. ‘You spent like, ten hours putting them on, Ames. They’re perfect.’

‘They’re lopsided, and you know they are.’ Amy squints at the tree, cocking her head to one side. ‘We have to fix them.’

‘O-kay,’ Jake grumbles, but he’s still smiling when she looks back at him.

‘You stand there and tell me when they’re on straight, okay?’

‘Gotcha.’

A bit of fumbling later and once Jake has stopped admiring Amy’s butt enough to pay attention to the lights, she emerges, looking pleased with herself. That is, until -

‘Ow!’

‘What? What’s wrong?’

‘My hair.’ says Amy, tugging at the back of her head. ‘It’s ravelled around the lights.’

Jake stares at her for a full minute, before bursting into laughter.

‘Jake!’

‘You look like the Grinch trying to steal Christmas.’

‘Ha-ha.’ Amy says, but he can tell she’s trying not to laugh. Probably because she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. ‘Can you help me get out?’

‘Yeah, but first…’

He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a wilting sprig of mistletoe. Amy glances at the white flowers, rolls her eyes, and reaches forward as best she can to tug him towards her.

His kiss is chaste, initially, barely sweet with the hot chocolate they shared earlier, but then his hands wrap around her face and he gravitates towards her as it deepens. She drops the train of lights from one hand to pull him closer, his mouth soft but insistent against her own.

Unfortunately, they forget that Amy’s still attached to the tree and nearly bring the entire thing hurtling down on top of them in their enthusiasm.

‘Oh my God!’ Amy shrieks, against Jake’s shout of ‘Shit, Amy!’

He manages to stabilise the tree before it goes crashing down to the floor - and taking a thoroughly bedraggled Amy with it.

‘On the bright side…’ Jake manages, after a few minutes of them collectively trying to get their breath back. Amy looks over; in his hand are about three strands of hair, and when she tentatively moves forward, the tree does not snap her back.

She can’t help it. She laughs, and Jake laughs too, and whether the lights are on in perfect formation or not, only Jake Peralta could bring her down from what should have been a four on the Santiago Panic Scale without even trying.

x

‘So, what’s Christmas like at your house?’ Jake asks her that evening, as she sets down her finished crossword and curls herself around him automatically.

‘Manic.’ Amy says at once. ‘There’s so many of us now that my dad does three turkeys.’

‘Traditional, then?’

‘In some ways.’ Amy pauses. ‘The real feast is for nochebuena. My brothers’ favourite night. Oh, and every year, my mom knits us Christmas sweaters with the first letter of our name on, and every year, my brothers try to make a different word in the family photo.’

Jake snorts. ‘I’m guessing these aren’t always family friendly words?’

‘Not since my nephew Federico was born.’

‘What about the day itself?’

‘It’s chaos, normally.’ Amy admits, her voice fading with sleep. ‘But…always a good time.’

She doesn’t think any more about the conversation until a few days later, when her mother calls to check the arrangements for Christmas day.

‘Are you sending mine and Jake’s sweaters in the post, or shall we just pick them up when we get to the house?’

There’s a silence on the other end of the phone. Amy frowns; her mother isn’t normally one to be lost for words.

‘Mija, I didn’t knit Jake a sweater. I didn’t know he was coming until a few days ago, and I didn’t know how serious it was between the two of you…’ she sounds almost accusatory now.

‘Oh.’ Amy says, feeling her cheeks warm. ‘Uh, don’t worry, Mom. I’ll sort something out.’

Amy can’t knit. She’s terrible at it. The needles always end up tangled in a web of wool and abandoned in a dusty corner.

But maybe she can learn. In six days.

x

It turns out that learning to knit is not nearly as difficult as _hiding _the fact that you’re learning to knit. For the first and only time she’s frustrated by Jake’s presence in her apartment, because there’s no way to hide what she’s doing when he’s bounding around singing Christmas carols off-key and she can only spend so long in the bathroom before it becomes suspicious.

Work isn’t really an option either. Gina has eyes like a hawk when it comes to spotting things people want to keep under wraps, and Charles has a habit of dropping things under people’s desks, meaning Amy’s had to resort to taking her knitting with her on the odd night Jake has a late shift or she’s sent on a lone stakeout.

‘I know what you’re up to.’

Amy startles, stuffing the half-finished sweater into her handbag and cursing thinking the breakroom was ever a good place to do something private.

‘Gina! What up, girl?’

‘Mmm hmm. Let’s see it.’ Gina says, hand outstretched.

Amy stares her down for all of three seconds, sighs, and shows her the sad woollen offering.

‘It’s not bad, Amy.’ Gina says, surprising her. ‘But you’ve got the pattern wrong. Here.’ her fingers are deft and nimble, and in a matter of minutes they work Amy’s knobbly creation into something almost decent.

‘You’re doing it for Jake, because you know he’s always had shitty Christmases with his mom working and his dad being a deadbeat asshole.’

‘Everyone in my family has one, so…’ Amy trails off, embarrassed.

‘You’re the best thing that’s happened to him.’ Gina hands her back the sweater, and blue meets brown. ‘Remember that pattern, and you’ll do just fine, Ames.’

They exchange tentative smiles for a moment.

‘Gina.’ Amy says, abruptly, as her friend turns to leave. ‘One question. How did you…?’

‘Jake’s nana tried to teach us both when we were kids.’ Gina shrugs. ‘Jake had no patience for it and even though I was good at it…I was better at everything else.’

‘Right. Thank you.’

Gina smiles, nods, and ducks out of the room as quickly as she entered it.

‘Okay.’ Amy stares down at the garment. ‘Up, down, underneath…’

x

‘So we’re leaving for your parents’ house on Christmas Eve?’ Jake drains his can of orange soda and looks over at her expectantly, muting _Jeopardy_ on the television.

‘Yes.’ Amy beams at him; he returns it. ‘But that reminds me, I want you to open one of your presents now…’

Jake watches her, curiosity piqued, as she hurries out of the room and emerges soon after with a lavishly wrapped, lumpy parcel.

‘A book? Amy, you shouldn’t have.’

She laughs, partly out of nervous anticipation now. ‘Just open it, you idiot.’

Jake holds her gaze for a second, before tearing into the parcel, just as she knew he would. He pulls out the sweater (dark green, with a wobbly blue ‘J’ sewn on front).

‘Is this…?’

‘A Santiago sweater of your very own.’ Amy says, watching him carefully. ‘It’s nowhere near as good as the ones my mom does because I’m a terrible knitter but-’

He cuts her off by yanking her into his open arms; the wool brushes against her cheek as she responds, arms weaving around his neck as his chin comes to rest on her shoulder.

‘Is this why you’ve been acting so jumpy and weird?’

‘Have I?’

‘Ames, I found you watering the windowsill plant with coffee yesterday.’

‘So…you like it?’

He releases her with a kiss to the cheek, and when she falls back onto her side of the couch he’s wearing _that _smile, the one that fills his entire face and her soul simultaneously; that’s so genuinely awash with happiness that she can’t believe she’s the one who put it there.

‘I love it. And I’m definitely wearing it to work tomorrow.’

He doesn’t, but he _does _wear it on Christmas Day, just the two of them, after the events of the last twenty-four hours.

As for Amy’s brothers; well, the next year, they’re thrilled about the new possibilities that ‘J’ gives them, and although Camila promises to knit Jake one for next year, he tells her with a smile that he wouldn’t change the one he’s got for anything.

He knows she knows what he means.

iii. two more reasons (why I love you so)

Watching his baby daughter squeal and gurgle from Amy’s arms as she flails at the dangling, frosted silver snowflakes that dangle from every ceiling, Jake can’t believe he ever doubted that he wanted this.

He trails just behind them as they traipse through the department store, just so that he can watch her eyes glaze and enlarge with every new discovery, ruffle the dark tufts of hair that are starting to fall against them.

‘Jake! There he is.’ Amy exclaims suddenly, hoisting their daughter more comfortably into her arms as she comes to a standstill. Jake immediately darts around her, his excitement palpable, until he lays eyes on the man in question.

‘Oh! Cool cool cool. Great.’

Amy, picking up on the sudden squeakiness of his tone, is instantly worried. ‘Jake, what’s wrong?’

‘I happen to know, uh…Santa.’ Jake mumbles, as his daughter babbles excitedly in the background. ‘I took a holiday job working at the grotto as an elf the Christmas after my dad left and my mom was struggling.’

Amy rests her forehead against his shoulder and leans into him more closely; he responds in kind, other arm snaking around her waist.

‘So one day…it might have been Christmas Eve, I was trying to separate Rudolph’s head from his-’ Jake hastens to cover his daughter’s ears and then whispers conspiratorially ‘-_butt, _because they’d started brawling in front of all the little kids, when I lost my balance and fell onto Santa’s lap.’

‘And?’ Amy says tentatively, knowing that there’s more to this story.

‘And I maybe accidentally tore his beard off and all the kids started screaming that he was an imposter.’ Jake says, in an unusually high-pitched voice. ‘He started hitting me with a giant foam candycane and told me if I ever showed up in his grotto again I wouldn’t live to regret it.’

‘Just out of curiosity, how many mortal enemies have you made by accidentally injuring them?’ A playful smile crests at Amy’s lips as she bounces their little girl on her hip.

‘Amy!’ Jake whines. ‘This is a disaster. Also, five. Or maybe six. I don’t know. Can we get back to the issue at hand, please!’

‘It’s really not that bad.’ says Amy, with a soothing squeeze of his hand, which is quivering against his thigh.

‘At least I didn’t pantse him, right?’ Jake says wildly, looking desperately at Amy for reassurance. ‘Tell me I haven’t just ruined Christmas for our daughter.’

‘Right.’ Amy says firmly. ‘Of course you haven’t. We’ll just queue up, and you can stand behind me and if he sees you, well, I’m sure it will be fine. He hasn’t seen you in what, twenty years? I doubt he even remembers.’

Jake nods gratefully, and allows Amy to tug him cloddishly into the queue, making faces at his giggling daughter. He’s just about to join in with the background music in a rendition of ‘Last Christmas’ for her amusement when -

‘Well, well, well. If it isn’t the laziest, clumsiest, most useless elf in the whole of the North Pole.’ “Santa” booms, startling a three year old boy who slips off his lap in surprise and runs, shell-shocked, towards his mother.

‘I spoke too soon…’ Amy huffs, as Jake flinches and faces her with his face frozen in terror.

‘Uh - we should go. There’s a Santa in just about every department store in Brooklyn. And none of them want to taste my blood.’

‘What?’ Amy says incredulously. ‘No way. I have it pencilled in on my planner. Three forty-five. Meet Santa. I’m not changing it now. And it’s ridiculous that he’s still hung up on some little mistake you made when you were a teenager.’

‘Ames-’

But the taut muscle in her jaw and the steel in her eyes dissuades Jake from saying anything else. When Amy gets that look on her face; cool, determined, there’s no point trying to sway her.

Following Santa’s outburst, the queue has dispersed as to force Jake, Amy and their daughter into central view, so they obligingly walk forward and towards the gigantic, bedazzled gold chair and its quietly fuming occupant.

‘Uh, Mr Salinger, long time no see!’ Jake follows this up with a braying laugh. ‘Good to see you’re still getting use out of that costume, eh?’

Santa very slowly rises to his feet and heaves himself off of his throne, advancing on Jake. His eyes, milky from age and alcohol, protrude dangerously from their sockets.

‘Um, so it’s Christmas, and my daughter was really excited to meet Santa.’ Jake gestures eagerly behind him, where Amy waves and the baby in her arms echoes the movement. ‘What d’you say we put all the bad memories behind us and make a little girl very happy?’

‘Get the hell out of here before I knock you to the North Pole and back.’ a vein jumps, thick and bulbous on Salinger’s forehead.

‘Look, I’m sorry for what happened when I was working here.’ Jake says, with tangible effort. ‘But my daughter didn’t do anything wrong. C’mon man, don’t spoil things for her. She’s been talking about meeting Santa for weeks now and it means a lot to her, and us.’ he looks over at Amy and she nods at him encouragingly. Two pairs of well-known dark eyes rove him.

‘Are you still as dumb as you look? I just _said_-’

‘Hey!’ Amy hisses, just low enough for Jake to hear. He’s not sure when she materialised at his shoulder but as always, her presence is soothing - even despite the likelihood of imminent violence.

‘If you ruin my daughter’s first Christmas over an accident that happened two decades ago I will have the entire NYPD come down on you so hard you’ll be seeing stars until _next _Christmas, got it?’

Although quiet, her words bite in a way that Salinger seems to physically feel, because he staggers backwards with considerably less purpose than before.

Salinger nods feebly, eyes flickering between Jake and his extremely awesome badass albeit angry wife. ‘Y-yes ma’am. Understood.’

‘Forget this,’ Jake says quickly. ‘I don’t want him anywhere near her.’ and then, in an undertone to Amy, ‘I think Terry has a Santa costume in his attic.’ she nods and turns on her heel, their daughter babbling incoherently in her arms.

‘Anyway. Yeah. What she said.’ Jake glowers into Salinger’s beady little eyes before gesturing between them in a mildly threatening manner. ‘You don’t want to mess with my wife, cause she -’

‘Jake!’

‘Yep! Coming, Ames…oh, and merry Christmas, Salinger. Try to stay off the reindeer liqueurs, okay byeee!’

‘Pfft, we definitely showed him who’s boss!’ Jake tuts later, as they stroll through the car park. He leans over and relieves Amy from their daughter whilst she fumbles one-handed for the car keys.

‘We did.’ Amy says, and when he turns to absorb her properly in the opaque afternoon light, her eyes are soft and creased with love; it crumbles around his heart as his daughter wraps her pudgy arms around his neck and inhales, happily.

‘Wazzat really Santa?’ their daughter suddenly pipes up from her carseat, stripy legs wriggling against the leather.

‘He wasn’t the real Santa,’ Amy reassures her at once. ‘He was a bad Santa. An imposter, if you like.’

‘Yep, I think I heard him making plans to meet up with the Grinch later.’ Jake adds, winking at Amy, whose laugh is swallowed by the gentle hum of the radio trilling to life.

Jake does text Terry on the nine-nine group thread later that evening, about borrowing that Santa costume. Hitchcock’s offer to wear it is instantly shouted down, but Jake’s barely paying attention at this point because he can hear Amy’s delicate warbling to their daughter from the next room and is drawn, like a magnet, towards them.

‘She wants you to tell her a story.’ says Amy, as he strolls in and she rises, her lips fluttering against the dimple at the edge of his mouth.

‘Daddy,’ his daughter affirms, settling down into her pillows in an authoritative manner that could only have been inherited from Amy. Jake grins, hunches down into the armchair by her bed, and glances at his wife before starting.

If his story that night contains a bad-tempered, cantankerous old codger who bears some uncanny resemblance to a certain department store Santa, then Amy never mentions it, but there’s a glint in her eye when she coils around him later that night, and there’s a wistfulness in her smile that he understands.

‘Merry Christmas, Jake. I love you.’

‘Merry Christmas, Ames.’ he waits, just long enough for her to pout and stick her inexplicably icy feet in-between his legs; it’s between raspy laughter that he answers.

‘I love you too.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know they don’t technically move in together until after christmas (post-captain Latvia) but idc :) also I couldn’t think of any baby names that I liked for j&a’s daughter and I cba being annoyed when it gets canonballed by the show so that’s why she is Nameless lmao 
> 
> also took insp. from the Weasley brothers’ jumpers in hp & a v old tumblr post about them arranging themselves to form rude words which you can find here: https://melvester.tumblr.com/post/103396685225/molly-weasley-having-so-many-grandchildren-that/amp
> 
> merry christmas everyone!!!! and if you dont celebrate christmas then very happy holidays to you!<3


	4. she is love (and she is all I need)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> snapshots post-7x06, 'Trying'.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [me in ten years]  
\------------> still not over trying  
chap title from 'she is love' by parachute.

Three days after Jake and Amy draw a line under their conception plans, they wind up in Shaw’s, basking in its warm glare and the faraway murmur of their friends.

They don’t hide away in a corner, nor do they quite immerse themselves as they might have before the past six months of highs and lows, of feverish kisses and the empty swallow of pills, of the still of disappointment, over and over until it lingered like a lead cloud around her.

Instead, they’re at the bar again. Jake is three beers in and it shows, his newfound alcohol intolerance; in the droop of his collar and the way he’s drunkenly grinning through her every word.

Amy nurses her second glass of wine and doesn’t think too much about it.

What she does think about, though, are the paper shreds of all those charts, of the stickers tucked away in her stationery drawer, of the baggy pants Jake’s insisted on wearing as pyjamas now - to the horror of several of their neighbours.

She’s thinking about what Jake said as he thumbed away the first tear as she tore into the last chart.

_‘I’ve never had a plan fail so spectacularly before.’_

_‘It didn’t fail,’ Jake had said, shaking his head. ‘Amy, you didn’t fail.’_

_‘I was supposed to get pregnant, and I didn’t. What else is that other than a failure?’_

_‘Hey.’ she’d looked up at the unusually firm tone. ‘It’s not a failure, okay? Think of it as…a long-term plan. And in the meantime…’_

_Two cans of orange soda._

_‘Short-term fixes.’_

They’d toasted each other over a ripped-up chart and discarded pill packets, but the moment tasted sweet and clear.

‘Ames?’

‘Hmm?’ she says, a lot more loudly than anticipated. Her second glass isn’t even half drained.

‘You want to go home?’ Jake is watching her carefully, but not with scrutiny; it’s tender and easy. Like she could walk right into his arms and he’d fold around her.

‘No,’ she says, slowly. ‘But I think you might need to pull the Captain away from that conversation.’

Jake turns around to where Holt is having a terse interaction with another beat cop, probably Debbie’s replacement. Amy knows Jake’s seeing what she’s seeing: the knotted brow, the slightly uneven lower lip - Holt is furious.

‘Damn it. He’s got so argumentative since he got demoted. Alright, I’m gonna break that up.’

He turns back to face her, and there it is.

_Amy…we _are _a family._

The future is uncertain. That much is not. There will be more decisions to make at some point.

Until then, tipsy on strawberry wine and the way the muscle in Jake’s jaw twitches like a heartbeat, and the soft luminescence of his eyes beneath the curl teased across his forehead, she is content.

‘You okay?’ Jake asks her, sliding his hand over hers. His wedding band weighs against her own, grounding her, like he has always been able to do.

‘Yeah,’ says Amy, and she means it, just like she means the kiss that grazes the side of his mouth as he leans towards her.

‘Love you.’ Jake calls over his shoulder as he slopes away.

‘I love you too.’ she says, and enjoys that, for just a moment. He is her golden hour, after all.

x

It’s a cool night, the brittle kind that whisks the blood from your very fingertips, but Jake’s hands are deliciously hot against her skin where her top has ridden up. He barely has her inside their apartment before she’s pressed up against the door, revelling in the recklessness, in the kisses that are as impassioned as they are reverent.

Because he never forgets to worship her.

Her left hand seizes the lower curls at the base of his neck; her right clasps his jaw and fixes it against her own as he kisses harder, trailing down her neck to the cool skin at her shoulder.

‘Jake…’ Amy mumbles, still hazy from the wine and delirious from the onslaught of his touch.

‘Ames.’ his voice is muffled against her lips, but he squeezes her waist and pulls her flush against him, making them both stutter at the friction.

It hasn’t been like _this _\- messy and spontaneous and them both high on the sudden intimacy of skin against skin - in a while. It’s been good, it’s left them both stupefied, but it hasn’t been like this.

Jake pulls at her shirt, patiently at first, but then she rolls her hips against him, laughing into his mouth, and he groans and yanks at it, hard.

She feels a thrill as the fabric splits, but the shock of a button hitting the ground seems to sober Jake a little, because he gently peels her away.

‘…protection?’ he manages, between breaths that are pleasantly balmy against her skin.

It’s clear that this is her choice. Jake wants what ever she wants. He wants a family, but he doesn’t need to look beyond what’s in front of him to find one. He just wants Amy; he always has. There’s no fickleness to his devotion, no splinter in his commitment to her, to their lives together.

It’s startlingly clear in her mind, too, now. This is the rest of her life, carved out with beautiful imperfection, before her. This is what makes her happy.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Tonight, we’re just being careless.’

It’s a little melancholy, the way this feels like she’s taking back control, but then Jake is nodding and kissing her fervently again, coaxing her tongue into his mouth, and she’s lightheaded with indulgence and too in love to care about anything else.

They’re reckless in their stupor - Jake knocks over an ugly vase David got them for Christmas and Amy nearly dents the wall when she slams Jake against the headboard, but it’s so viscerally divine. It’s just Jake, and Amy, and sex that doesn’t have an acronym.

She doesn’t take a pregnancy test the next day. Jake wakes her up with breakfast and some improvised chorus of an old Taylor melody, and she lets him spill crumbs on her pillow and smear toothpaste on her cheek, and it doesn’t feel like anything is missing.

How can it, when she has him?

x

There are still fragments of heartache. Moments that give her pause. But when she feels as though her war paint is running, Jake is always there.

While she sleeps, he spins her every dull thought into gold, gold.

When Terry spills into the precinct one Thursday morning, gleeful about Cagney losing her first tooth and Lacey’s letter to the tooth fairy demanding her own dollar, she smiles and coos over the cold, sparse feeling in her gut.

And then there are Jake’s hands coiling around her waist, filling her with warmth. It’s not love by halves, it’s everything, it’s kismet.

So, when they do finally get pregnant - a few months down the line - it doesn’t feel like the rush of colour, or light after ages of enduring the dark.

No, Amy decides, when Jake’s face - fathoming, fathoming, alight with realisation - blooms blissful and delight, when he grabs her and sways her clumsily in his arms - it’s some kind of miracle, but it’s love, nothing else, that did it in the end.

x

‘I can’t believe how cute these matching baby plates are.’ Amy beams, running a finger along the patterned plastic. ‘We did so well. Let’s go back there next week for the high-chair and mobile.’

‘I can’t believe I spawned.’

Amy’s mouth folds into a grimace.

‘Ok, bad turn of phrase. I meant I can’t believe I actually…that _we _actually…’

He trails off, voice cracking, and it’s only when Amy materialises in front of him with liquid eyes and a crease at her lips that he finds his voice again. ‘That I’m actually having a baby with the love of my life.’

‘Me either.’ Amy says, softly, her breaths a little heavier when he rests his hand squarely on the curve of her stomach.

He thinks back, suddenly, to bets and errant peanuts and fights about orangina that weren’t really about orangina at all. He thinks about being pelted with a crush that he didn’t understand and falling in love so quickly that the days before he just wanted Amy have ebbed away into what feels like another life. He thinks about the husk in her voice and the tear in his throat when he realised he was ready to start trying and the weight of her hand in his when they threw away her birth control and the way her dark eyes eclipsed when she told him she was pregnant.

‘Why don’t we go back tomorrow and get the high-chair and stuff?’ he says, and Amy’s head rolls from his chest to look at him properly.

‘We’re having lunch with your parents tomorrow.’

Jake pulls a face and Amy’s fingers meander into his hair, tugging just enough to press her mouth to the patch of missed stubble.

‘We promised your mom.’

‘After then. Or before.’ Jake says, impatiently. ‘I just - I want to do this right, Ames.’

He can feel her mouth curling into a smile against his neck. ‘You already are, Jake. The store will still be there next week.’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t want to go back and get that baby blanket with the periodic table on it before it sells out. Not that I’d worry about that happening.’

‘Fine.’ she mumbles into his chest. ‘As long as _you_ admit you want to go back for those baby air force ones.’

‘C’mon, you know those were adorable.’ Jake allows her - begrudgingly - to tease herself out of his arms and raise a hand, slightly awkwardly, to her hip.

‘They also cost a fortune and the baby will grow out of them in two weeks.’

‘And _in _that time we can get loads of pictures of us in our matching sneakers.’

She sighs in a half-relenting, half-exasperated way, and he easily gathers her back in his waiting arms, feels the new life thrumming away between them, the soft protrusion that in seven or so months will be their baby.

x

Jake springs upright, sheets pooling around his waist, to the sound of an almighty crash. If that wasn’t concerning enough, his wife is absent from her usual spot in their bed, wrapped around him with her perpetually cold feet tucked between his legs.

He waits - for a second - and then, ‘Crap!’ - that’s Amy’s voice alright, and she sounds furious.

Although Amy’s binder specifically says that babies in the womb can’t hear until around eighteen weeks, Jake’s made an active effort to stop swearing - and tried to encourage others at the precinct to do the same, to varying results. Rosa just stared at him for seventeen seconds and Hitchcock asked if ‘wing sluts’ counted, so he’s not entirely sure he was successful.

There’s an unmistakeable, vitriolic f-word and Jake, thoughts eviscerating, flings himself out of bed, not bothering to stop for his slippers because Amy will definitely have stolen them, and hotfoots it into the kitchen in time to see his very distressed wife tussling with their cookie jar that seems to have swallowed her hand whole.

She’s wearing one of _his _NYPD shirts, he knows by the ranch stain under the left armpit that never fully faded, and although normally he’d accuse her of thievery if only for a sultry wink and a saccharine promise to make it up to him later, something tells him she’s not in the mood to be teased.

But his shirt is a little taut around her midriff, the sweet swell of their little one, and his heart is pulsing in his chest just thinking about it; he’s dumbstruck, he’s spellbound, he can’t believe this is really his life.

‘Jake, go back to bed.’ Amy says stiffly, interrupting his thoughts. Her face is dewy in the early yellow hues. He loves her.

_‘Awww, _Ames.’ Jake says, grinning as he approaches. Her soft pout is rapidly looking more and more like a scowl. Which is all the more endearing, _not _that he’s going to admit it. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’

‘Because I told you off for eating all those cookies before dinner.’ Amy huffs. ‘And now look at me! It’s only because my wrists have swelled up so much in the last week and a half.’

She tries, valiantly, to maintain a frown, but as Jake’s brow furrows with that well-worn affection Amy can’t help but smile. When he extends a hand and brushes away the crumbs from her cheek so tenderly with a warm thumb, when his ring finger kisses a smooth trail down her jawline, her heart shudders and one single thought resounds: that she chose the right man to start a family with. Jake loves with everything he has; it’s unyielding and uncompromising and he’s already utterly devoted to their burgeoning family.

‘I’ll get the butter.’

‘We ran out this morning.’

‘Soap then?’

‘First thing I tried.’

There’s a note of pride conspicuous there; because even at nearly one in the morning, and nearly six weeks pregnant, and ridiculously sleep-deprived, she’s still Amy.

‘Well…’ Jake sticks his head inside their refrigerator, trying not to laugh. Amy’s a little tense right now. Not that he blames her, although he’s been in this situation many times himself as a kid and oddly, it never bothered him that much. ‘Jelly?’

‘Since when do we have jelly?’

‘Charles brought it over. He made it himself, I think, it’s got pineapple and castor oil and a whole load of other gross stuff in it. It’s supposed to help with labour.’ says Jake, fingering the jar gingerly.

‘And you let him bring it into our apartment, _why_?’ Amy cocks an eyebrow.

‘For this exact eventuality.’ Jake smirks, and she rolls her eyes but willingly holds out the trapped hand for him to massage the frankly, repulsive, jelly substance onto.

She wriggles her hand and with a squelch, it slips free. Jake staggers backwards with the jar for a second before setting it on the counter and grabbing Amy’s wet, slightly red hand. Because that’s love.

‘Thanks. And for not making fun of me.’ she says, squeezing his hand with unprecedented strength.

‘I mean, I had to get you free first.’ Jake smiles down at her. ‘But that now you mention it, there were about a hundred sex-tape jokes I could have made that would have fitted this scenario perfectly, but didn’t.’

‘Sorry, babe.’ Amy uses her dry hand to pull him down for a slow, simple kiss.

‘Did you get your midnight pregnant lady fix?’ says Jake, when they break apart. ‘Do you want anything else? Pancakes? I don’t think we have any eggs. Or flour. But I can-’

‘I’m full.’ she says, and Jake raises an eyebrow. Possibly at the way her eyes are shifting steadily over towards their larder. ‘Well, alright. I was thinking of going down to that twenty-four hour bodega on Seventh for some of those candyfloss grapes-’

‘I’m on it,’ Jake exclaims before she can even finish the sentence; by the time she’s remembered the anchovies, there’s a flash of leather and the door is banging shut behind him.

_Best husband ever, _she texts him alongside her additional requests. _But disgusting food combinations? Definitely your doing._

_my doing ? ames,if we conceived the night im thinking of that was all you._

_Hurry back and you might get a repeat <3._

_OMW_

x

Morning sickness is basically a given through the Santiago line. Amy’s mother had it with each and every one of her children, as was the first thing she made sure to pass on when they gave her the big news.

So, of course Amy’s prepared for it. She eats plenty of little meals - Jake packs her little tubs of crackers and plain bread to chew on at her desk.

She drinks ginger tea by the gallon - the woman at their all-night bodega recognises Jake easily by now and practically shoves the teabags into his hand before he can get a word out.

She avoids coffee - Jake’s selflessly trying to give it up too, with remarkable progress since they discovered even kissing after he’s had a sip sets her off.

But maybe there’s something in the water, or she’s not sleeping quite the recommended eight hours, because halfway through an interrogation her abdomen contracts, she swallows a gag and bolts out of the room past a bewildered Hitchcock and Scully and just makes it to the bathroom on time…where she recycles the entire contents of her stomach, including the shredded wheat from that morning and the banana she managed between filing arrest reports.

The precinct toilets aren’t exactly the nicest to be slumped over - at least their bathroom at home has reed diffusers and lavender bath salts and the odd cinnamon candle, but Amy wallows there for thirty seconds in a tired, hot flush after the waves of nausea subside.

She feels filthy, the kind of griminess that permeates, and what’s worse is that the ladies’ bathroom is just off the bullpen and all of her colleagues have probably spent the last five minutes trying not to listen to her emptying her guts.

‘Oh, honey.’

Amy doesn’t even hear the door open, but she registers Jake crouching down beside her and gently unpicking her from around the toilet seat, his arms manoeuvring to encase her until she’s pressed in his arms.

‘Sorry for being gross.’

‘You’re growing our baby.’ Jake says immediately. ‘Gross is the last thing you are right now. Beautiful? Incredible? An absolute miracle? All yes. But gross? My wife? Never.’

‘Ugh…’ Amy pushes him away just in time to get her head over the bowl before she’s throwing up again; Jake doesn’t flinch, doesn’t recoil. He moves closer, strokes her hair into a gentle grip and rubs her back in soothing, repetitive circles.

‘Want me to distract you?’

‘Please.’

So, he does. He starts talking; first, about the new Taylor Swift documentary on Netflix - and when they’re going to watch it, and by the time she’s finished he’s onto why trying to force Joey and Rachel together was the worst idea, _ever _-

‘How are you feeling, babe?’ he asks, helping her shakily to her feet.

‘Not great.’ Amy sighs. ‘And I didn’t bring a spare toothbrush, which was just so stupid-’

‘Wait - don’t move - stay right there.’ Jake instructs her, pausing to make sure she doesn’t slump back to the ground when he releases her. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

Amy nods and goes to rinse out her mouth and wash her hands - it’s the best she can do until she gets the hand sanitiser from her handbag - and Jake re-emerges minutes later as she’s drying them off with a paper towel.

‘Remember when we had that stupid night at Shaw’s with my childhood hero-turned-homophobic scumbag, Jimmy Brogan? And I had nearly an entire bottle of whisky and came to work the next day looking and feeling like I’d been chewed up and spat out?’ says Jake, hands behind his back.

‘Vaguely.’

‘And you came in looking perfect in your perfectly pressed pantsuit and perfect shiny hair and perfect perfectness with a hangover cure for me?’

‘Jake, if you have raw eggs anywhere on your person-’

‘Toothbrush, mouthwash, dental floss because you’re a weirdo.’ Jake says, matter-of-factly, and with each item he presses into her palm she falters, lip trembling and palms weak for an entirely different reason now. ‘I started keeping them in my desk when you started getting sick.’

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks her, as she stares at the tiny toiletries in her hand, motionless.

‘Just, you.’ Amy smiles up at him, and even though her mouth is still cloudy with the aftertaste of vomit and her eyes red-rimmed from streaming, he leans down and kisses her sweetly.

‘I told you, Ames.’ Jake shrugs. ‘I’m all in.’

With Jake, she's come never to expect anything less.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new ep in 2.5 hours !!!!!!!!! and i'm still re-watching trying sdfkdldj  
wrote this very quickly ce soir after my one (1) remaining lecture got cancelled  
kudos & comments are love :))


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